Posted!

Join the Conversation

Comments

Welcome to our new and improved comments, which are for subscribers only.
This is a test to see whether we can improve the experience for you.
You do not need a Facebook profile to participate.

You will need to register before adding a comment.
Typed comments will be lost if you are not logged in.

Please be polite.
It's OK to disagree with someone's ideas, but personal attacks, insults, threats, hate speech, advocating violence and other violations can result in a ban.
If you see comments in violation of our community guidelines, please report them.

During the first week of rehearsal for the touring production of The Sound of Music, the cast did not sing a single note.

No “Edelweiss,” no “Do Re Mi,” not even “My Favorite Things.” Instead, they focused on the script.

Many people associate The Sound of Music with Julie Andrews running through an open field, as she did in the opening of the 1965 movie-musical. Because the movie is so iconic, it’s easy to forget that The Sound of Music started out as a 1959 musical on a Broadway stage.

During the rehearsal process for the new tour, director Jack O’Brien and his cast went through every line and every lyric of the original book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse in order to understood the show on its own terms, not just as a precursor to the beloved movie.

The national tour of The Sound of Music will be playing at the Rochester Broadway Theatre League Auditorium Theatre from Feb. 28 to March 5.

“It sort of plays like a new show even though it’s paying homage to what the original creators started with,” says Ted Chapin, a producer of the show and president of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization.

When the original show first opened on Broadway, it was primarily a star vehicle for Mary Martin. However, it also featured atypical political undertones by depicting the Nazis only 15 years after the end of World War II.

This was risky for a Broadway musical, and the show kept from being too bold by avoiding explicit references to Salzburg or swastikas.

Even so, “it was very clear to the 1959 audience what time we were talking about and what the outside threat to these people was,” says Chapin. “It was fresh in everybody’s mind.”

Teri Hansen plays Elsa Schraeder.(Photo: MATTHEW MURPHY)

Fans of the movie may be surprised by the show’s discussion of politics. Many will remember Captain von Trapp’s staunchly anti-Nazi stance, but they might not remember the opposing views expressed by two of the secondary characters, Elsa and Max. They advocate for a more blasé, “take care of yourself” attitude, as expressed in the number “No Way To Stop It,” which wasn’t in the movie.

Chapin says this song, and the idea of figuring out how to react in times of political trouble, resonates more today than it did when the tour first opened in 2015.

“Theater should make audiences take note and pay attention to what’s going on with the characters in the story, but if there’s a resonance they can pick up, that’s where theater is elevated to a higher level.”

Meet the new Maria

It’s easy to think of Maria as a role for a big Broadway star, since it was originally written for Mary Martin and then played by Julie Andrews. But this production takes a step back and looks at the character on the page.

“She’s a young girl who thinks she’s on her way to being a nun and then this detour happens and completely changes her life,” Chapin says.

Consequently, O’Brien didn’t want Maria to be played by a huge star. He wanted somebody young and fresh who could capture a character still figuring out who she wants to be. When the tour started, Maria was played by Kerstin Anderson, a sophomore at Pace University. Replacing her is Charlotte Maltby, another up-and-coming musical theater actress. Maltby was cast as Maria on her 23rd birthday and will be finishing the tour days before her 24th.

Maltby turned to Maria von Trapp’s original memoir, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, to learn more about the original Maria.

“She’s the girl running around the abbey getting yelled at for singing and for sliding down bannisters and for being late,” Matby says. “She’s so quirky and weird and I love her.”

Maltby didn’t have trouble creating a version of Maria separate from Julie Andrews’ interpretation, because she says The Sound of Music wasn’t really in the canon of films she watched growing up. This may be a surprising lapse to anyone who knows her father, Richard Maltby, a Broadway lyricist and director.

“My family was more of a Music Man/Singin’ in the Rain kind of family,” she explains.

Maltby grew up in New York City within a family that, clearly, valued the arts. She says she knew since she played Smee in a kindergarten production of Peter Pan that she wanted to be a performer. A love of the creative arts appears to be contagious in her family: Her sister ended up becoming a director and choreographer, and her brother is a film editor.

“My dad is always saying, ‘Oh my God, why can’t one of you be a doctor or a lawyer — why did you all have to go into the arts?’” she says, laughing. “It’s great to be able to talk about what we do at the dinner table.”

Because she grew up with the arts, she has a firsthand appreciation for The Sound of Music’s message about how music can bring together a family. “Creativity and the arts are important for all children regardless of whether they grow up to be artists or doctors or lawyers.”

She also appreciates the show’s message about staying true to one’s beliefs, and has found that reading Maria von Trapp’s autobiography has enhanced her appreciation for the story.

In the musical, the captain gets a commission in the German navy, but in actuality he received even more offers: His son was offered a medical position (to replace a Jewish doctor who had been taken away), and the family was invited to perform at Hitler’s birthday. To reject any of these offers would have been a major insult, and his entire family would have had to escape their country, leaving behind their material goods and community. But if they accepted, they would have had to give up their faith and their honor, knowing that their good fortune came from complicity with a government that was trampling human rights.

“So the captain sits down with all of his children and says. 'We have a choice now,'” Maltby explains. “'Do we want to be happy and comfortable or do we want to be poor and honest?'”

Their final decision “is exactly the kind of message that I am so grateful that I get to be bringing across the country right now.”

Melody Betts plays The Mother Abbess in The Sound of Music.(Photo: MATTHEW MURPHY)

Local musicians chime in

As the cast performs around the country, they are joined by only four traveling musicians: two keyboard players, a violinist and the conductor. The remaining 13 musicians that make up the pit orchestra are local.

Ramon Ricker, a professor emeritus at the Eastman School of Music and prolific writer of music pedagogy, has been booking the local orchestras for RBTL musicals since the 1980s. He will also be playing clarinet in the the pit orchestra.

The local musicians get the music in advance, but they don’t get to rehearse with the actors until they come to town.

“Usually playing the music is not that difficult,” Ricker says, “but playing it at the right time tends to be difficult.”

Then again, even with limited time to rehearse, the level of talent takes care of any problems. Ricker assembles some top-notch musicians, several of whom play with the RPO and all of whom have ties to Eastman. He says the caliber of performers coming out of Eastman helps Rochester maintain a good reputation among traveling shows. “Plus, we’re friendly,” he notes. Always a plus.

Ricker notes that the recent trend in musical theater has been toward shows with pop and rock scores, many of which have smaller bands (just keyboard, bass and guitar) that don’t need to hire additional local musicians.

The Sound of Music, though, is a Golden Age musical with a more traditional orchestra. “It’s an older kind of sound,” Ricker says, “but actually, it kind of makes it fresh. In other words, there’s not a lot of guitars.”

By bringing a mid 20th-century sound and script into our current politically charged American moment, The Sound of Music promises a few hours of old-fashioned entertainment with a surprisingly poignant resonance.